Author: Sarah Yakel

While 2025 has been full of surprises, the double-digit outperformance of international stocks over United States stocks was on very few economists’ bingo cards for this year! Following another strong year of outperformance in the US economic growth and market returns, non-U.S. equity markets have overtaken US

The last few weeks have felt like total chaos—at home, our routine schedule has been upended with weather-related school cancellations, kids with the flu, and late nights of basketball games. At Meridian, we’ve been working hard on the usual year end reporting and tax preparation tasks, as well as rebalancing

HOLD…HOLD… As the calendar turns to 2025, many people immediately start to think about filing taxes. While it’s generally a good thing to avoid procrastination (I tell myself…), your 2024 tax filing may be an exercise in patience for some… If you are one of those very organized people who do have all your

Happy Holidays from our Meridian family to yours!  We are taking a break from the blog next week, so have a happy and safe New Year’s celebration, and we look forward to seeing you in 2025! — Sarah Yakel   Blog Disclosure

I’ve started grocery shopping with my air pods in…not to be anti-social but because—as a Christmas purist—I firmly believe that there should be NO Christmas music before Thanksgiving. If you start listening now, then you’ll hear “All I Want for Christmas” 2,954,359 times before December 25. Stores are

With October being Estate Planning Month, we wanted to address IRAs (individual retirement accounts). Until the SECURE Act, IRAs were relatively easy to incorporate into an estate plan. As long as beneficiaries are named after the IRA owner dies, the assets are automatically and easily transferred to the account

This week marks the 9th anniversary of Meridian Financial partners — as we prepared for our annual client event earlier this month, we all had a moment where the tremendous growth over the last 9 years became apparent…and was truly humbling that so many people choose to trust us with their family’s future. We

Last week, we dropped Melanie off at her new home for the next four years: James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She has had a whirlwind of a week, meeting tons of new people, learning how to co-exist in a suite with 5 other girls (and share a bathroom with 11 girls!), and navigate a […]

We’ve been receiving a lot of questions about paying off mortgages or using cash to buy real estate…Nathan covered the question of whether to purchase a home with cash (or use cash for a larger down payment) in his Meridian Market Minute, so this blog post is about using cash or investments to pay off […]